Rene Fournier wrote:
> Being slightly familiar with BSD, I'm trying to get my feet wet with
> Linux, and was wondering if anyone can suggest a good walkthrough of
> setting up a CentOS server with Apache, PHP, and MySQL...
yum install httpd php php-mysql mysql-server
Et voilà.
> 1. Is there a "right" way to install software on Linux in general, an
> CentOS in particular?
Normally you use yum for doing so. <http://centos.org/docs/5/html/yum> should
contain enough info.
> For example, the Package Manager on CentOS 5.2
> allows you to install certain software, but often not the latest
> version. So if I go download MySQL 5.0.67 from the web, how do I install
> it and make it play nice with the rest of the system? Ditto for PHP
> 5.2.6.
You can't except if you build these also as RPMs. And rebuild every other RPM
which depends on those against the newly built RPMs.
> And once installed (either by the Package Manager -- and by the
> way, why are the apps it lists so out of date?), what's the best way to
> update PHP and MySQL?
CentOS is not and never was about the latest and greatest. CentOS is about
having a stable set of packages which do *not* change over the lifetime of
the product (with a few exceptions). Security fixes are backported into these
versions. More info about that can be found on http://wiki.centos.org/
> Is it simply a matter of downloading the binaries
> again and overwriting the existing install?
No, because those will get overwritten on updates.
> On Mac OS X, such downloads come as .pkg files that seem to take care
> of so many details without requiring a trip to the command line.
Same for RPM.
> 2. Where should software, such as PHP, MySQL, Apache2, be installed? /
> usr/bin ?
/usr/bin only when installed by the package manager. /usr/local/bin for
selfcompiled packages, /opt/ for binary packages. man hier(7)
> 3. Is it a bad idea to install some software from the command-line via
> wget, some software from the graphical Package Manager, and some
> software from the the web? What I mean is, so far it seems like Linux
> manages the list of installed packages, and I just wonder if I'm
> screwing things up this way.
Yes. Bad idea and it *will* screw up your system. Read up on CentOS and try
to understand why we ship exactly that set of packages contained in any
of the 4 available CentOS versions. If you find that not having the newest
software available, CentOS might not be the correct distribution for you.
If you want to have a stable set of packages supported for seven years(!),
then stay with CentOS. Mixing CentOS packages and "stuff from the web" will
not help with that.
Ralph
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